Eating In: A Series on Food in New Hampshire

Recent food scares from lettuce, spinach and peanut butter show that we are far away from keeping out food safe. We’ll look at the issue of food safety, what’s being done in New Hampshire and the debate over making standards even tougher.

All this week, during our Food series, we've been using terms like organic, localvore, and sustainability.But a couple of poultry farmers in Barrington want to add another word to the mix.They want people to talk about Heritage....specifically heritage fowl.It's part of their campaign to ween Americans from poultry factories and get them back to eating the eggs and meat our grandparents would recognize.NHPR's Keith Shields brings you this last story in our series, Eating-In

The recession took a big bite out of the household food budget. How did the lean times change us? This hour on Working It Out Live, we follow the chain of food through this economy. We’ll be hearing about how families changed how and where they shop.

As part of our series, “Eating In” NHPR’s Amy Quinton looks at the path an apple takes to get to your plate.

The apple has been around a long time…just think of Adam and Eve… and would we have so many adages about it?… “An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…one bad apple spoils the whole bunch…an apple a day…” you get the picture.

Maybe it’s all the knives, or the blood. But there’s something a little eerie about a slaughterhouse on wheels.

If you raise chickens, or lamb, or hunt deer for food, you might need the service of a good roving butcher. Like Ray Garcia of Cabin View Farms in Littleton. Solo, he can process about 200 chickens a day in a home built rolling abattoir:

It’s a Wells Fargo Trailer. We have stainless steel tables, stainless steel sinks. If it wasn’t for a lot of the custom facilities throughout New Hampshire, a lot of people wouldn’t be raising things.

Many in the Granite State are interested in localism and many farms, restaurants and organizations are pushing to move even more local, but it comes with its challenges. New Hampshire’s climate, land and development limits the amount of food that can be made in the state and with no organized distributions centers, localism requires much more work and higher prices for farmers and businesses that take their food. We’ll look at what’s being done in New Hampshire.

All this week in our series “Eating In”, NHPR has been looking at food – where we get it today and where it might come from tomorrow. For a lot of people, the economy forced them to take a second look at how they spend their food dollar -- whether that meant going to restaurants less or changing what they buy at the store.

Through the Working It Out web site, NHPR’s Jon Greenberg came across a woman who found herself headed towards a total food makeover.

Major grocery chains in the region have jumped in on the buy local movement.They’ve been finding local suppliers for many of their fruits and vegetables.And while that can mean increased sales for small farmers, it’s coming at a cost.The retailers are requiring small farms to get certified as safe growers by the USDA.To consumers alarmed by e.coli scares, it sounds like a great idea.But as, part of our food series, NHPR’s Elaine Grant reports that many New England farmers say the new policy may keep them out of the market.

In the course of the great recession, household incomes went down and food prices went up. The combination did no favors for the American diet. Sales for the least expensive snack foods climbed. As part of our week-long look at food, NHPR's Jon Greenberg digs into some cheap calories.

SFX - Crunch

Along with Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, count the potato chip as one of the big winners of the recession. John Dumais, president of the NH Grocers Association, says, many of his members would have had a much worse year if it hadn't been for sales of snack foods.

All week we’ve been investigating where our food comes from. If we’re eating right, that leads back to a farmer.

Today the average age of the American farmer is 57 years-old. In the last 5 years, 35 percent of farmers turned 75 years or older. Last year, the country lost 10 percent of its dairy farmers. On top of the troubling demographics, kids growing up in rural America are less likely to join the agriculture business.

NHPR's week-long look at food, "Eating In", continues now with the next course in our dinner at Josh Roger's house. Josh cooked for the NHPR news team and each day this week, we trace the supply chain of one of the more common ingredients used in that meal. Today, NHPR's Jon Greenberg presents the humble potato.

A new green business start-up called EcoMovement is working with Seacoast cafes and restaurants to separate their compostable waste from normal trash. Their goal is to push the Portsmouth area to become a "zero waste" community, while helping business owners be more eco-friendly and save money on trash removal.

This week we've talked about food policy, supply, safety, and to people who advocate that we all connect the food we eat to where it comes from. We've also talked about the self-righteousness that foodists tend to project. Talking the talk about food is big business; walking the walk is another story.

Michael Perry is a musician and author of several books. He grew up on a small dairy farm in Wisconsin worked by his devout, fundamentalist parents. He left to make his way as a nurse, a writer and musician.

We begin today with school lunches. In between algebra and U.S. history, public school students often have 20 minutes or so to scarf down less-than-satisying meals. The sugary junk food on sale in cafeterias is one reason that one in three children born in 2000 is on track to develop Type ll Diabetes.

Conversations about eating well often fail to account for limited family food budgets – especially in a recession. That’s why Jason Hirsch, food editor for the Associated Press, presented this challenge to two chefs and a magazine editor: prepare a week’s worth of meals for a family of four, using the sum of $68.88.

That’s the national average a family of four receives every week under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the updated name for the food stamp program. More than 38 million Americans, or one in eight, now depend to some extent on food stamps.

All this week, as part of our food series, NHPR, has been looking into the possibilities of a regional food system. What would it look like? What would have to change? One of the largest obstacles facing farmers in northern New England is something they can’t change. The weather. It’s a short growing season when the rule of thumb is don’t plant before Memorial day. But as NHPR’s Mark Bevis reports, farmers across the region are finding solutions ….under glass.

More New Hampshire consumers are desiring local food, saying it helps the community, the environment and the local economy. But there are some who suggest that localism takes too much energy and isn't feasible on a large scale. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of localism.

While the USDA opposes the sale of raw milk – they’d prefer you drink pasteurized - raw milk - straight from the cow, filtered and chilled - is making a comeback. It’s now sold in 28 states. Don’t bother looking for it at the store though.

People need to come here and they need to bring their own containers. They come here so they can see my animals, they can see our operation. They can decide for themselves whether the animals look healthy, whether everything’s clean.

As more and more people begin thinking about where their food is coming from, many turn to local sources.The growth of local fruit and vegetable markets bears that out.And it seems to be the case for meat too.Farmers would love to fill the demand for local meat.But as part of NHPR’s food series this week, Elaine Grant reports that meat producers face a significant obstacle.

SOUND: CHEWING NOISES

It’s lunchtime at Miles Smith Farm in Loudon.Buffy, one of farmer Bruce Dawson’s Scottish Highlander cows, is enjoying her hay.

Supermarkets are carrying more organic products than ever before, and many more are farming organically as well. But critics say organic has no more nutritional value, and that we need to think beyond organic to really address the global food crisis. We’ll hear from both sides of the debate.

In the conversations around localism, one Northern New England town has received a lot of attention.A few years back, Hardwick, Vermont made national headlines as the poster child for the local food movement.The town had been struggling with a median income 25 percent below the state average.Its unemployment rate was 40 percent higher.As part of our food series, Eating-in, NHPR’s Keith Shields brings you the story of a town saved by an agricultural uprising.

Yesterday we set the timer on NHPR's food series Eating In and spoke to Berlin Reed, the vegan-turned-ethical butcher about knowing where our meat comes from. I asked him what happens in places like New England, where we have lots of sustainably-raised livestock, but no places to process them. Well, we’re learning a lot from eating in as well, and today we heard Reporter Elaine Grant’s piece on a new, federally inspected slaughterhouse in Westminster, Vermont that opened three weeks ago So, there is now a place for prospective livestock farmers to close the circle locally.

Here's something you would not want to have for dinner: Methacillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, or MRSA.

Yesterday a report released online by the Journal Pediatrics found a 10-fold increase in MRSA diagnoses among children over 10 years and a three-fold increase in the use of one drug, which indicates that the epidemic that particulary threatens children is becoming much more serious.

Lessley Anderson, senior editor at chow.com came to the studio today and assured us that while publishers of newspapers, novels, and magazines haven’t fared so well in the marketplace of free content, not all print genres are doomed.

There’s a lot of interest in how much we can produce in this region. But when it comes to growing fruits and vegetables, everything, of course, depends on the weather. Cameron Wake is a Research Associate professor at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire. He's also Director of Carbon Solutions New England. Wake says that if we continue business as usual, scientists predict an increase in average temperature of about 12 degrees by the end of the century. And the results could be catastrophic.